In his own memoir Darkness Visible, Pulitzer Prize winner William Styron searingly chronicled his battle with deep depression. Here his youngest daughter Alexandra, herself a novelist, explores the complex dynamics of growing up with such a powerful but unpredictable head of the house, where intelligence and creativity were fostered but emotional turbulence was the norm.

"Ardent, sophisticated and entirely winning.... Her touch throughout this memoir is quite fine and very sure. As tough as she is on her father, she sees clearly the better man he could sometimes be.... This is a grown-up memoir, taut and true."—NYTimes

"Reading My Father is the memoir of a childhood in an intellectually glittering, artistically engaged and emotionally precarious household. In this portrait, by turns tender and unsparing, we meet William Styron, the charming bon vivant undone by depression, the gifted and prolific writer whose long struggle to finish his final novel may have imperiled his sanity. Fluid and fascinating, dark and funny, Alexandra Styron's book brings her father before us in all of his complexity, a literary lion, roaring his way through America's post-war landscape."—Geraldine Brooks